PRO BASKETBALL; N.B.A.'s New Universe Rotates Around Cable

The next time ABC Sports broadcasts an N.B.A. game, it will be Game 1 of the finals, on June 6. Though hardly winded, ABC will rest during the conference finals (it did two games last year), as it will for the next four years during what is probably the best part of the playoffs. ESPN and TNT have taken over.

ABC hardly makes the ripple that NBC Sports did for a dozen years through the 2002 finals.

At no time in recent N.B.A. television history has a broadcast network -- which reaches more people than cable and, thus, more casual viewers who might tune in as series heat up -- been so minor a player.

But this was ordained by N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern when he made his six-year, $2.4 billion deal with ESPN and ABC, and renewed his long-term deal with TNT, for $2.2 billion. And ever since, Stern has been saying that the allure of NBC's doubleheader/tripleheader approach had faded, along with the appeal of 5:30 and 8 p.m. prime-time games in Eastern time. ESPN's young viewers, he said, are my young viewers. Come hoop with me.

So this is the new N.B.A. paradigm: Go where you think your fans are and where the money is -- cable. Expose your league to ESPN, the Walt Disney Company's real Magic Kingdom, through its networks, its Web site, radio network, Spanish-language TV network, its magazine, wireless, video-game and high-definition TV businesses.

''We anticipated the changes that were coming -- of continually reduced audiences on network TV,'' Stern said during a joint interview at the N.B.A. office last week with George Bodenheimer, the president of ESPN and ABC Sports.

You cannot, Stern said, live in the past and by the standard measures of fading broadcast TV potency. For him, it is an alliance only partly about viewers. It is mostly about reaching the league's fans across ESPN the Behemoth 24 hours a day.

Because cable is where the money is, highly rated staples from the broadcast era -- the All-Star Game and the conference finals -- migrated to cable and drew fewer viewers. At the same time, ABC broadcasts about half the number of games that NBC did and its ratings fell.

By flooding cable with games, Stern has lost the promotional power of NBC, which reaches young viewers far better than ABC does.

Stern happily notes that total viewership -- a wide measuring stick -- of N.B.A. games on ESPN, ESPN2, TNT and ABC rose to 243 million from 223 million last season. In 2001-2, the last hurrah for the NBC-TNT-TBS universe, there were 229 million.

But the regular season is less valuable than the playoffs.

In last year's conference finals, where some of the best series have been played in recent years, the 10 games on ESPN, ABC and TNT totaled 34.2 gross rating points. In 2002, the comparable number of games on NBC and TNT was 62.7.

It is hard to trample on research that says a prime-time NBC promo on ''E.R.'' reaches 14.2 million adults 18 to 49, while one for ABC's ''Primetime Thursday'' reaches less than one-third of that.

But then, ABC is not all that important in this equation.

It's the cable, stupid.

Yet in last year's finals, ABC's first under the deal, its 6.5 rating was a league low, 36 percent below NBC's finals finale in 2002.

ABC's ratings fell 8 percent during the regular season and are down 4 percent in the playoffs. Its young male demographic also fell.

ESPN's rating and young male demographic rose slightly this year.

Yet in my fuddy-duddy ratings rut, I wonder whether ESPN The Corporation builds new fans or simply exposes the league to the hard core in a continuous loop.

Since the deal, ESPN cites some factors to illustrate gains from the N.B.A. deal; they are more coincidental than direct but have happened over the past two years.

Five million more sports fans each week, 94 million, consume ESPN's wide selection of media and stay for 50 minutes daily, 11 minutes more than before. Estimates are that the N.B.A. has gained 10 million new fans since March 2002. And N.B.A. game clips and other content make up a major part of ESPN Motion, the crystal-clear video feature used by two million users on ESPN.com

It is an addictive 24-hour pitch to the hard core, totally different from what NBC offered, and difficult to compare. But Artie Bulgrin, ESPN's senior vice president for research, said, ''Ultimately, you end up with a much better customer who is not just watching the N.B.A. on weekends, but is using N.B.A. product all week, in all forms of media, who becomes a much better and more avid fan.''

Correction: May 24, 2004, Monday A title and a byline were omitted in some copies yesterday from a sports column about the increasing dominance of cable television in broadcasts of National Basketball Association games. The column was TV Sports, and the writer was Richard Sandomir.